Sunday, December 29, 2013

I was enjoying a Christmas
martini – that’s it above. You can see
the festive holly around the glass. In
fact it was a vodka martini: I’m not always a gin martini snob, though I admit
that I sometimes am. And as I drank I
spared a thought (actually a number of rather divergent thoughts) for Lauren
Platts, lately of Sheffield, my home town in England. That's her below.

A year or so back Ms. Platts, a
student at Sheffield University, bought a bottle of “vodka” from a local corner
shop. The man behind the counter said, “All this stuff will make you blind”. She thought he was joking, and possibly he
was, but he certainly must have known he was selling bootlegged liquor. The
girl drank about a third of the bottle mixed with lemonade before going out for
the night. I’m going to imagine that she
may have done some more drinking in the course of the evening.

Next morning, as she later told BBC, some months after the event, “I woke up with the worst migraine I have ever had.” I don’t know how bad her migraines usually
were, but she went on, “I was throwing up, I couldn’t keep anything down. I
wasn’t able to get out of bed for two days.”
And then things got worse and stayed worse. “My vision goes blurred, I have black blotches
and I tend to lose my peripheral vision quite a lot. It’s really scary when you can’t see anything
when you are driving or even walking down the street trying to cross the road.
I think I might have it for good but I’m just grateful to be alive or not
completely blind.” Well yes, I imagine it might be a little scary if
you can’t see anything when you’re driving, and not only for the driver, still ... Impaired sight may be the least of it. Nerve damage and the inability to walk are
also on the menu.

We all know that people are naïve and stupid, which is
why laws exist to protect them, and it does seem that the Sheffield Trading
Standards Office has been very active in stamping out dangerous and potentially
poisonous fake vodka, which is likely to
contain industrial alcohol, and possibly chloroform. Though results are mixed. In one case, a Sheffield shopkeeper was fined
£582 for keeping 674 bottles of counterfeit vodka under his counter. The
council called the fine derisory, as would any sane person.

Still, a significant cause of
the problem, a reason bootlegging is a profitable business in the UK, may be
because booze is so damn expensive there. The store brand vodka at my local
L.A. supermarket after sales tax costs less than $9, the equivalent of just
over £5, and there are certainly cheaper ones around. Whereas in
the UK the duty and value added tax alone on a legitimate 70cl bottle of vodka
total £8.89, the equivalent of $14.63, so no bottle of real vodka in the UK is ever
going to cost much less than £10. In a
perfect world this would lead to moderation in the kingdom. In the real world it leads to people drinking
antifreeze. Lauren Platt's bottle cost

£5.99.

If nothing else, the Lauren
Platts case does, I think, give us a reason to drink martinis rather than vodka
and lemonade. If you have in front of
you a glass of scarcely diluted liquor than claims to be vodka, the taste and
the smell are going to tell you right away if something’s wrong. That might not, of course, necessarily stop
some people from drinking it.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

First it
was reported (i.e. I’m not entirely sure I believe it – I’ve only found one
source for it) that Flight Captain Noushad of
Pakistan International Airlines delayed take off a flight from Lahore to New York for two hours, while he waited for a sandwich
to be delivered to him from a five star hotel.

Noushad supposedly said he "needed sandwiches
at any cost" (I know the feeling) after he learned that there were no “gourmet
treats” on board, only peanuts, chips and cookies. He continued demanding the
sandwich even when he was told it could take two hours to get one from the
hotel. And apparently it did. The flight was due to take off at 6.45 and
didn’t leave till 9.15. (All this is “allegedly.”) Food on Pakistani International Airlines sometimes looks like this:

Type “Pakistani sandwich” into google and you’ll find
a surprising number of surprisingly unexotic sandwich recipes. On the website pakistanifun.com you can find a
recipe for a French Chicken sandwich, but at least
it’s in Urdu.

Meanwhile
the BBC reported that in Khartoum rising prices mean that people can no longer
afford their traditional falafels, so they’re eating cheaper foods in their
sandwiches and coming up with exotic names for them. A banana in a
roll is now a Gigabyte sandwich. Another
sandwich, the Sound System, contains cows' ears. I find it surprising that bananas are cheaper
than chickpeas even in Sudan, cow ears I’m not so sure. In any case they're lining up for it (below).

A company here in the US called Best Buy Bones
specializes in selling cow ears as dog
treats, “A Grease Free Alternative to Pig
Ears” they say. They come in blueberry,
cherry and vanilla flavor, which is obviously going to push the price up, and
they sell for about $2 per ear, which still strikes me as extortionate, but I imagine that price is based on what the
market will tolerate, and that nothing’s too good for people’s effin dogs.

In other sandwich news Anne Fishbein a
very fine photographer, not exclusively but not least of food (you can see her
work on http://www.annefishbein.com), published this photo on her Facebook page showing that
sometimes minimalism is good too:

Compare and contrast with the this bit
of sandwich engineering:

I also came across this school detention slip on a website that collects such things.

It took me a while to realize that YOLO
means “you only live once,” and I suppose different people have different ideas
of what constitutes living, but you can’t help thinking that the “youth of
today” might come up with something a bit more zesty than sandwich throwing.

Crossing my own sandwich threshold – I
ate a Langer’s Number 19, which is by all accounts a very famous, not to say
iconic, L.A. sandwich, and as you see above it contains pastrami, cheese,
coleslaw. It was terrific, not least the
coleslaw, but it was a funny thing, as I ate it I was well aware that the Loved
One would enjoy that coleslaw even more than I did. Such is the nature of long-term relationships.

And then at the weekend we found ourselves
in Sherman’s New York Style Deli and Bakery, in Palm Springs, where I had great
food envy. I ordered an open face corned
beef and chicken liver sandwich, which was very good indeed and looked like
this:

But I kept looking over covetously at
what the Loved One had ordered, the grilled cheese sandwich with crinkle-cut
fried potatoes. She let me have a couple
of potatoes. Such also, fortunately, is the
nature of long-term relationships.

Monday, December 16, 2013

And speaking of things stuffed inside other things, I don’t know about
you but I find I’m invited to fewer and fewer parties at which people leap out
of cakes. Dita Von Teese apparently does
it quite often, including at the Hugh Hefner’s 80th birthday party,
but I wasn’t invited to that.

However I do see a couple of disadvantages with the “burlesque
performer” in the cake scenario. First, when
you arrive at a party and see a large, wooden thing in the shape of a cake
sitting in the corner you can be pretty sure somebody’s going to jump out of
it. The second disadvantage is that
since the “cake” is indeed made of wood, you’re not going to be able to eat the
thing.

How very
different from the home life Sir Jeffrey Hudson (1619
– 1682) also known as Lord Miniumus, a pituitary
dwarf who when he was seven years old became part of the household of the Duke
and Duchess of Buckingham where he was regarded as a "rarity of
nature." He was, as the saying
goes, small but perfectly formed. Whether
he was quite as perfect as he appears in the portrait above, painted by Van
Dyle in 1633, I’m not sure, though he obviously had appeal. Perhaps less so as he got older.

When Charles I and his wife Queen Henrietta visited the Buckinghams the hosts threw a banquet,
and at the highpoint the king and queen were presented with a large game pie, out
of which young Jeffrey emerged. Now that
must have been a surprise, and of course you couldn’t actually have eaten the contents
of the pie, i.e. Jeffrey, but you could at least have eaten the crust, though
you have to imagine that an aristocratic banquet would have offered more
interesting fare than pie crust.

In The Accomplisht
CookOr the Art and Mystery of Cooking,
written by Robert May, first published in 1660, there’s a section headed“Triumphs and Trophies in Cookery, to be
used at Festival Times, as Twelfth-Day, &C.” containing instructions for a
feast that involves making a ship out of pastry, complete with working cannon,
a stag made of pastry, with an arrow in the side of him, and his body filled up
with claret wine and an arrow in his chest so that “some of the Ladies may be persuaded
to pluck the Arrow out of the Stag, then will the Claret wine follow as blood
running out of a wound.” The best image I can find of a pastry stag is
this one from Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch by Conrad Hagger from 1719. It
doesn’t seem to have an arrow or any claret but I’m sure something could be
arranged.

Surrounding
the stag, were more ordinary looking but some were to contain live frogs, others
live birds; “you may suppose they (the guests) will desire to see what is in
the Pies; where lifting first the lid off one pie, out skips some Frogs, which
makes the Ladies to skip and shreek; next after the other Pie, whence comes out
the Birds; who by a natural instinct flying at the light, will put out the
Candles; so that what with the flying Birds, and skipping Frogs, the one above,
the other beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole
company.” Well yes, it might go that
way. Though arguably a pie containing a
live pig might be even more fun.